The disadvantages young women face in the labor market and in entrepreneurship in developing countries are not only substantial and complex, but they quickly compound. A plethora of forces drive gender disparities in youth employment: lack of opportunities to develop the skills demanded by the labor market, family or social pressure dissuading them from entering desirable jobs or male-dominated sectors, a detrimental work environment, or a lack of available services such as childcare might make achieving success an uphill battle. Yet innovative youth employment programs can respond to gender issues. Below are three examples presented in a recent virtual workshop held by the Solutions for Youth Employment (S4YE) coalition with members of its Impact Portfolio community.

How can we Press For Progress —the theme of International Women's Day 2018— to improve women's opportunities at work? Despite progress on women’s health and education in the past few decades, the gender gap on access to jobs has remained a stubborn challenge.

We learned that from potatoes and waste recycling in Lebanon to aquaculture and poultry in Zambia, it is possible to have a standardized base guideline; however, the methodology still needs to be adjusted for specific economic, political and social contexts. (Photo: Dominic Chavez / World Bank)

There is a well-known idiom saying that you can't compare apples and oranges. But this is precisely the challenge researchers often face when it comes to measuring the jobs impact of development projects. Having standardized impact evaluation tools and methods is a milestone for private sector-led job investments, and it allows international financial institutions, development practitioners, and governments to build on existing knowledge to develop solutions. And this is precisely one of the goals that Let's Work partnership, composed of 30 different institutions, is currently pursuing; to track the number of jobs generated from private sector-led interventions, the quality of those jobs, and how inclusive those jobs are in a standardized way, so apples are compared to apples and oranges to oranges.

Thomas Farole, one of the authors of the report, explains three ways of understanding North Lebanon's jobs challenges and opportunities. (Photo: Sonia Madhvani and Timothy Clay / World Bank)

North Lebanon’s beauty has been tarnished for several decades by an environment of conflict and violence, which has contributed to high levels of poverty and marginalization. More recently, the region’s challenges have been aggravated by a large influx of Syrian refugees —around 1.5 million refugees with a population of just 4.5 million people—, fleeing war in their country and seeking livelihoods in a place where good jobs are scarce for its own citizens.

Creating more and better job opportunities in such contexts could seem complex. But even in its fragility, Lebanon still has a chance to spur job creation and put the region back on the path to prosperity.

Many countries struggle with creating more and better jobs, especially when they try to increase the number of women in the labor market. Integrating women from more traditional, rural communities is especially difficult. And, if we are talking about a country with the second lowest female labor participation in the world, it might seem like an impossible task. This is exactly the situation that Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan faced a few years ago, and today they provide an interesting example of how innovative policies can address this challenge.

Increasing the number of jobs publicly listed, enabling public and private institutions to better connect workers to jobs will not likely solve the jobs problem in developing countries. (Photo: Jonathan Ernst / WorldBank)

With the right kind of reforms, public employment services can do a better job of matching job seekers from poor households. In low and middle-income countries, individuals from poor households find jobs through informal contacts; for example asking friends and family and other members of their limited network. But this type of informal job search tends to channel high concentrations of the poor individuals into informal, low-paid work.

Job seekers especially from poor households need bigger, more formal networks to go beyond the limited opportunities offered by the informal sector in their local communities. This is where public employment services can help, but in developing countries many of these services just simply do not work well: they suffer from limited financing and poor connections to employers, and governments are looking for ways to reform and modernize them to today’s job challenges.

There are lots of cases where developing countries have improved their public employment services and these can serve as models. The lessons from these successful reforms can be distilled and replicated. Based on our recent publication, here are three case-tested strategies that improved the performance, relevance and image of public employment services.

Rapid progress in digital technology, behavioral economics, evaluation methods, and the connectivity of youth in the developing world generates a stream of real-time insights and opportunities in project design and implementation. (Photo: Arne Hoel / World Bank)

Innovations in youth employment programs are critical to addressing this enormous development challenge effectively. Rapid progress in digital technology, behavioral economics, evaluation methods, and the connectivity of youth in the developing world generates a stream of real-time insights and opportunities in project design and implementation. Part of the challenge is the sheer number of projects (just in Egypt, there are over 180 youth employment programs). And even without being aware, projects often innovate out of necessity in response to situations they face on the ground. But innovations need to be tested in different country contexts to be able to make an impact at scale.

Through the new Solutions for Youth Employment (S4YE) report, our team ventured to curate a few such ongoing innovations as they were being implemented through S4YE’s Impact Portfolio — a group of 19 youth employment projects from different regions being implemented by different partners across the globe. This network of youth employment practitioners serves as a dynamic learning community and laboratory for improving the jobs outcomes of youth globally.

Since 2008, the share of manufacturing in GDP across Africa has stagnated at around 10%, calling into question if African economies have undergone structural transformation vital to sustained economic growth. Photo: Curt Carnemark / World Bank

Over the past decade and a half, Sub-Saharan Africa has experienced rapid economic growth at an average annual rate of 5.5%. But since 2008, the share of manufacturing in GDP across the continent has stagnated at around 10%. This calls into question as to whether African economies have undergone structural transformation – the reallocation of economic activity across broad sectors -- which is considered vital for sustained economic growth in the long-run.